Many communications systems have the ability to provide intercept services. Intercept services are services for intercepting calls and providing an eavesdropping capability. These services are lawfully used mainly by law enforcement agencies (LEA) within their jurisdictions.
In prior art communications systems, intercept lists are maintained within switches, so that calls to be intercepted can be routed by the switches to the appropriate intercepting party, usually a LEA. When a call is placed, the switch consults the intercept list and, if the list designates the call as one to be intercepted, the switch routes the call to the intercepting party for eavesdropping. This works well as long as the juridical boundaries of LEAs and the service areas of communications systems coincide. This does not work as well when the juridical boundaries of LEAs do not coincide with the service area of communications systems. For example, if two communications systems are within the juridical boundaries of an LEA, and a user to be intercepted leaves the service area of the first system and enters the service area of the second system, it is necessary for the intercepting LEA to have that user added to the intercept list of the second system. As users become more mobile, and as the demand for intercept services grows, the problem becomes more acute.
In order for LEAs to track users to be intercepted through multiple communications systems, LEAs must contact service providers of those systems to have the users' information entered in the appropriate intercept list. It would be desirable to have a method and apparatus for dynamically updating intercept lists contained in switches so that LEAs would not have the burden of manually attending to the problem.
Satellite communications systems are revolutionizing the communications industry, and are exacerbating the already acute problems of maintaining intercept lists. People are now able to communicate with anyone, anytime, anywhere on the planet. This causes problems for the LEAs to control the lawful interception of calls. The service areas of the communications system are no longer fixed, and so it is not possible to determine a priori whether a user is within the juridical boundaries of the LEA based on which communications system is being accessed. The prior art methods and systems rely on the fact that if a user is using a given communications system, he is within the juridical boundaries of the LEA, and the call is automatically intercepted. With satellite based systems, the fact that a user is using the system does not show that he is within the juridical boundaries of the LEA. In fact, the user could be within one of many different LEA jurisdictions, and potentially, anywhere on the earth. It would be advantageous to have a method and apparatus for location based intercept. That is, it would be advantageous to have a system that would make intercept decisions based on user location information.
What is needed is a method and apparatus for centralized management and administration of intercept lists in a communications system. What is also needed is a method and apparatus for location based intercept in a communications system.